Studio City

In a remote spot in China, the world’s biggest movie lot is getting even bigger.

Hengdian’s lot is eight thousand acres and includes a replica of the Forbidden City.

Photograph by Matthew Niederhauser / INSTITUTE

Today, the Palace of the Qin King, an austere complex with curved roofs, red pillars, and a grand entrance of ninety-nine steps, rises amid the green mountains of southern China. Two thousand years ago, it was nestled in the scrubby hills of the north, where its occupant became the country’s first emperor. That structure now lies in ruins, but a replica of the original can be found at Hengdian World Studios, the largest movie lot ever built. On a drizzly morning in March, the palace’s front gate was besieged by a throng of tourists, while a watchtower was filled with actors filming a historical drama.

Nearby, extras assembled outside the gates of an imitation Forbidden City, hoping to join a cinematic mob. The set has been featured in dozens of productions filmed at Hengdian. Although it is a bit smaller than the original compound, in Beijing—some of the minor buildings have been edited out—it looks better, gleaming as it did at the peak of imperial rule. In the capital, the Forbidden City is run by one of China’s most obtuse agencies, the Ministry of Culture, and the buildings there look worn and battered. In March, all that was missing from the Hengdian model was Chairman Mao’s picture, on the Gate of Heavenly Peace—but that was only because the set had recently been used to shoot a movie that takes place before 1949.

Some of China’s most iconic buildings have been erected on Hengdian’s sprawling lot, giving the place the ersatz-historical feel of Colonial Williamsburg. The sets look authentic on camera, even if illusion is sometimes involved: when I visited, carpenters assembling a banquet hall were painting cheap pine so that it resembled fine Burmese rosewood. Across the lot, construction teams and artisans were re-creating Shanghai’s Bund, the series of European-style buildings along the Huangpu River which defined the city’s era of colonial control and decadent living.

A few movies filmed at Hengdian, such as Zhang Yimou’s 2002 martial-arts epic, “Hero,” have achieved international success, but most are tailored to the Chinese market. Hengdian specializes in costume pageants and patriotic war films. (Last year, sixty per cent of the films and TV shows shot there were set during the Second World War, which is known in China as the Anti-Japanese War.) The scripts call for romance, violence, and ambition, and the acting is melodramatic: to signal anger, performers arch their brows and widen their eyes like the door god of a Chinese temple. Makeup often recalls Peking opera: heavy and bright, as if the faces were meant to be seen onstage rather than in closeup.

In March, productions being filmed included “The Wolfish Smoke of War,” “The City of Desperate Love,” and “The Priceless Key to the Palace.” I joined a crew surveying locations for “The Scout’s Sword”—a thirty-part television epic celebrating the courage of Communist commandos in China’s civil war. We got into a gray van and sped past a made-to-order Zen temple. In the back was Ah Jiao, a thirty-eight-year-old studio manager who helps hold the anarchic lot together, setting schedules and settling disputes among the crews jockeying for shooting time on some stretch of Hengdian’s eight thousand acres. The lot is twenty-seven times larger than Universal and Paramount studios combined, but it’s still not enough: on average, there are twenty movies or television dramas being filmed at Hengdian simultaneously, and many more directors are waiting to begin shooting. Filmmakers are eager to tap into China’s box office, which last year totalled $2.7 billion, surpassing Japan to become the world’s second largest. Others come to supply China’s gargantuan television industry: the country has more than twenty-five hundred stations.

Ah Jiao’s phone rang, and she tried to pacify two factions vying to occupy a tenth-century palace. “Can you delay your shooting a day?” she asked one producer. “It would be better if you could wait and start later.” Calling another number, she said, “You can’t keep it that long. Can’t you speed it up?”

She put down her phone, turned to the men in the van, and relaxed: they were old friends who had worked with Ah Jiao many times. Led by Jia Zuoliang, an art professor and set designer, the crew was looking for a field where they could stage a battle from the nineteen-forties. That was an easy task: Ah Jiao’s specialty is staging wars. Hengdian keeps large expanses of farmland fallow, ready to host any army. Short on soldiers? The lot has nearly twelve thousand registered actors and extras, and Buddhist priests are available to bless the cast and crew. A studio slogan is: “Arrive with your script, leave with your reels.”

Hengdian takes its name from the town that it dominates, controlling its land and its economy. When the lot needs to be expanded, the company blows up mountains, flattens villages, tears down temples, and bulldozes cemeteries. It’s currently re-creating an eight-hundred-acre Qing-dynasty pleasure palace. Hengdian doesn’t just want to make films; it wants to use its sets to tell the Chinese people their history. Last year, nearly twelve million tourists came to see the country’s architectural marvels, all in one place.

When I visited the lot, the studio was gearing up for dozens of spring productions. Ah Jiao was working twelve hours a day, six days a week, coördinating the crews. She was immaculately turned out—fluorescent-blue down jacket, red boots, black tights, shoulder-length permed hair—but her thin fingers repeatedly drummed her phone, and exhaustion rimmed her eyes.

The shoot for “The Scout’s Sword” was scheduled to start in two weeks, but pulling things off at the last minute is the Hengdian way. We parked on the crest of a hill, and walked past a bus filled with Red Army soldiers. A casting director for a television docudrama, “Mao Zedong,” stood on a row of sandbags, supervising two men who were dabbing black paint on clumps of red earth. “It’s raining,” the casting director said, pointing to the troops in the bus. “The soldiers can’t come out.”

We pressed on, descending the other side of the slope, beneath glistening pine trees. In the distance was a small lake, and across it were the white smudges of a village. A wooden farmhouse appeared in the mist. These days, most of China’s villages are made of concrete, which means that a studio farmhouse need only be wooden to look generically old. The farmhouse had been built for an adventure film set in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), but Jia said, “We can use it. Things didn’t change too much in the countryside.” He snapped photographs and drew sketches for ten minutes, until the rain picked up.

As we hurried back to the van, Ah Jiao said, “When do you want to shoot? The eighteenth, right? So what if I give it to you on the fourteenth?”

“Only four days to prepare?” Jia said. “Can’t we have it earlier?”

“It’s cheaper if you work faster.”

He laughed, knowing that he couldn’t win. “O.K.”

The trademark of the town of Hengdian is a golden water buffalo. At major intersections, replicas stand in traffic circles, gazing at passing cars. Legend has it that the beast lives on Eight-Faced Mountain, an extinct volcano on the outskirts of town, and one day will descend and lead people to prosperity. Locals like to joke that the buffalo has already arrived, in the form of Xu Wenrong, the retired head of the conglomerate that owns the film lot: the Hengdian Group.

Xu, who is seventy-eight, started the company in 1975, when Mao was still alive and private enterprise was illegal. In many parts of China, Xu’s kind of market instincts resulted in the death penalty, but Hengdian was in Zhejiang Province, a freewheeling area of the country, and the company began churning out components for electronics, such as semiconductors and circuit boards. The Hengdian Group is now worth $6.7 billion.

Venturing into films was an equally pragmatic decision. In the nineties, Xu took note of China’s booming domestic-tourism industry and devised ways to lure visitors to the area. He started with rural resorts featuring song-and-dance shows, but they fell flat. In 1995, however, he met another native of Zhejiang Province, the film director Xie Jin, who was preparing to shoot “The Opium War,” a movie about China’s humiliating loss to the British, in 1842. The film was a big propaganda effort, and Xie had top-level backing from the government, but he couldn’t find an outdoor lot for nineteenth-century street scenes. There was no time to waste: the film had to be released on July 1, 1997, when China would regain control of Hong Kong, which it had lost in the war.

According to Xu’s autobiography, published in 2011, he promised Xie over dinner that he could build the set. Asked which films he liked, Xu had to admit that he never watched movies. Xie declined the offer and went home to Shanghai. That week, Xu sent an assistant to Shanghai to follow up. Desperate, Xie accepted, and in January, 1996, Xu started construction.

Xu mobilized the small town, assigning tasks to a hundred and twenty teams. He made sure that everything was built by hand, as if a real town were being constructed. When Xie said that he wanted old, worn stones for the streets, Xu dispatched teams to the countryside to buy stone floors from the homes of peasants. He even took some tombstones from unmarked graves. Xu completed the set in August, and the film was released on time.

Soon, other filmmakers came to Hengdian to use the “Opium War” lots, and they told Xu what other sets they needed. Xu began building full-scale, fairly accurate replicas of famous old temples and palaces. He also created a facsimile of the Communists’ remote wartime base in Yan’an, with caves dug into the mountains and a replica of the town’s famous pagoda.

Hengdian’s strongest lure is its price: Xu builds, renovates, and offers his lots free of charge. Chinese stars rarely earn the big money of their overseas counterparts, so production costs are a key factor in movie and television budgets. Shooting at Hengdian is such a relative bargain that it outweighs the site’s main drawback: remoteness. There are no air or rail connections to Hengdian, which has around a hundred and fifty thousand residents, and the closest large city is two and a half hours away by car.

Profits come from the studio’s subsidiaries, which provide costumes, props, design, catering, and other services. Revenues at the studio are also driven by tourism. Visitors pay fifty-five dollars for a two-day pass, and the Hengdian Group controls most of the area’s twelve thousand hotel beds.

The baroque sets and costumed hordes recall Cecil B. De Mille’s glory days in Hollywood, from the nineteen-tens to the fifties. But those spectacles were some of the most expensive and profitable films of their era, helping to disseminate American culture worldwide. Hengdian films have low budgets, and the town has no villas, fancy night clubs, or high-end restaurants. There’s no equivalent of Rodeo Drive, and no cinema that’s elegant enough for a blockbuster première.

As the Chinese-American producer David Lee told me, the town’s sleepiness can be an advantage. Some of Lee’s movies have been partly shot in Hengdian, including “The Forbidden Kingdom,” a 2008 action film starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Though top-flight talent can find Hengdian maddeningly dull, Lee said, “From a producer’s or director’s point of view it’s great: we’ve got you guys in one place, and we’ll shoot and shoot.”

For all its constraints, Hengdian can feel more like a movie town than Hollywood does. The big lot has long been passé in Hollywood; instead, films tend to be made on location or in front of green screens, with backgrounds later generated by computers. As a result, Hollywood itself has a hollowed-out feeling. At Hengdian, you immediately sense that movies are being shot all around you. Air horns blare to silence chattering extras, trucks off-load freshly made props, and directors yell at their assistants. Low-slung Porsches dodge potholes, and crews mill around on break. Once, I saw an actor, dressed as a Red Army soldier, rhythmically moving his head. Snaking out of his ammunition belt was a white wire, working up his torso to his head: earbuds.

One day, Ah Jiao picked me up and took me to the Street of Great Knowledge, a boulevard lined with two-story buildings and groups of young people chatting and playing pool.

“Hengdian drifters,” she said. “They come here looking for acting work. Some make it, but a lot just stay for a year or two and go home.”

I wanted to meet some of them, so she drove down the road and dropped me off at a friend’s place—a photography studio run by one of the stalwarts of the acting community, Zhang Xiaoming. A trim forty-four-year-old with a receding hairline, Zhang was helping an actor with his résumé, which included images of the man as a Taoist priest, an emperor’s minister, and a nineteen-thirties businessman.

An actress named Jennifer Tu stopped by. “I play spies, police officers, and court ladies,” she said, handing Zhang a memory stick containing photographs of her in costume. A round-faced twenty-six-year-old, she used to earn fifteen hundred dollars a month as an English translator in Shenzhen, and now makes a third of that. But she has seen herself on television. “It was about the Anti-Japanese War,” she said. “I was a journalist. I thought it was O.K. We know the history.”

The door opened and Tian Xiping entered, greeting Zhang in a booming voice. Tian, who is forty-nine, used to sing for a living, but he told me that he had gained too much weight. “It looks bad if you’re a fat singer,” he said. “So I went into acting.” He now made a hundred and twenty dollars a day as a professional fat man, and worked about a hundred and fifty days a year. “The way I look, I can be a fat cook or a commander-in-chief,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of generals.” In his next role, he would be a pig butcher.

“But there’s a cost,” Zhang said. Actors feel that they must live in Hengdian in order to find work, but this separates them from their families. Last year, Tian’s father was seriously ill, and Tian couldn’t get home before he died.

“We’re like migrant laborers,” Tian said, nodding.

While we were talking, a dark-eyed man walked in. He had a shaved head and a thin mustache, and he stared at me in an unsettling manner. I cocked an eyebrow at Zhang.

“This is Gu Dechao,” Zhang said. Gu had recently performed as Chiang Kai-shek in a thirty-episode television series, and still looked the part. “Remember? Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Chiang—the Big Four. If not for him, it wouldn’t be the world we know today! The baldy.”

“The way I look, I always play villains,” Gu said.

“He can’t play good guys!”

“Bosses in triads, local ruffians, hoodlums, despotic landlords.”

“But now he’s eaten too much and is fat. He used to be thin.”

“A guy like me should look like an opium addict. You see me and you want to vomit.”

Gu was currently working as a casting director for a new television series, and he invited me to observe the shoot. The rain had driven the production into a makeshift studio across town. Hengdian is an improvised patchwork of new roads that have no signs, and we soon got lost. We drove past Ah Jiao’s offices, down the row of carpenter’s shops that make props, and along a road that dead-ended at a brick wall. There was a car-size hole in the wall and, after making a phone call, Gu drove through it. We lurched over a dirt field that looked like a vegetable garden strewn with rocks. Then we hit a road lined with derelict buildings and, after a few more phone calls and wrong turns, ended up in an alley of old factory sheds.

Sitting out front, on a wooden throne, was Danny Lam, a Hong Kong set manager. He wearily waved us inside. At the entrance, there was no red light demanding silence; like most television shows in Hengdian, it would be dubbed later, so only minimal effort was made to keep things quiet during shooting. The factory had been transformed into the interior of a Chinese palace: red and black walls, with touches of gold leaf. The décor reminded me of Shanghai Tang, the luxury clothing store.

Lam has worked in Hengdian for eight years. “It’s run by a businessman, so it’s efficient,” he said. “Whatever you need is here. Song dynasty, Ming, Qing—whatever. It’s all quickly available.”

The series, “Four Young Famous Vigilantes,” is set in the nineteenth century. It’s about a comic band of heroes—a fencer, a boxer, a genius, and an alcoholic loafer—who are charged with safeguarding the imperial capital. The heroes have colorful names: the boxer is Iron Fist, the fencer is Cold Blood. The byzantine plot features a lot of skulduggery and double-crosses. The episode being shot involved Iron Fist trying to rescue his girlfriend, who had been kidnapped by the series’ main villain. When the weather cleared, the team planned to film a kung-fu sequence at the Forbidden City lot.

The series was packed with action, but it also “emphasized a lot of history,” Gu said. “I don’t really know why, but that seems popular.”

Few people are as obsessed with their history as the Chinese, who have a sense of continuity with the past that is rarely appreciated by outsiders. Most Westerners trace part of their intellectual history to peoples who lived in what are now foreign countries, or spoke languages that are now essentially dead. For the Chinese, history and myth are local, and classical Chinese isn’t incomprehensibly removed from today’s vernacular.

Chinese dynasties recognized early that history could be a form of control. Past intrigues and betrayals were described with relish, but only when the narrative was sufficiently deep in the past to become a kind of folk story, like today’s bodice-ripping fictionalizations of Henry VIII’s era. Dissenting histories were usually eradicated. Authoritarian rule continued this tradition, and the result is that many Chinese have a hard time challenging orthodox interpretations, say, of the Han Chinese conquest of minority areas, or of the Communist Party’s role in the Second World War. Even today, Han influence is widely seen as civilizing, and few Chinese are aware that the Communists played only a minor role in resisting the Japanese.

Chinese history makes an ideal topic for cinema and television; with the basic narrative firmly in place, emphasis can be placed on the colorful, the exotic, or the magical. Such stories also tend to please government censors. Hengdian productions are vetted by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, and scripts must avoid controversial or contemporary topics. Most screenwriters have internalized the official version of China’s past, so historical productions usually receive quick approval.

Several years ago, a new genre emerged on television, in which modern Chinese characters travelled back in time, gaining insights from historical figures. Censors, feeling that such stories questioned the superiority of contemporary life, banned the form in 2011. A government decree said that such shows “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism, and reincarnation.”

Still, the public cannot entirely be prevented from interpreting costume dramas with a contemporary eye. One of the most popular shows in China is “The Legend of Zhen Huan,” a Hengdian production, set in the eighteenth century, about a concubine who wins over the emperor through cold-blooded guile. Chinese bloggers dissect the stratagems that Zhen Huan deploys in her rise to the top; in one episode, she falsely accuses the empress of causing her to have a miscarriage. At the end of the seventy-six-part series, Zhen Huan is alone and friendless—the official moral of the story—but most viewers are impressed by her cunning. One blogger suggested that the palace drama offers useful lessons in “management theory and workplace strategy.”

Superhuman powers also figure prominently in Hengdian productions. Such stories defy the Communist Party’s official championing of science, but the censors let them pass, because they reflect a larger Chinese belief in the supernatural and allow filmmakers to demonstrate the superiority of China’s cultural tradition. One of my favorite productions in this genre is “The Anti-Japanese Magical Knight,” a 2010 story about a six-man team of martial artists who appear to defeat the Imperial Japanese Army single-handedly. In the goriest scene, one of the stars bursts into a Japanese fortress and punches a soldier with such force that his fist penetrates the man’s torso, causing him to split down the middle as if he were a block of wood; guts and blood spew like water from a hose. In other scenes, heroes fly or dodge bullets fired at point-blank range—they have the kind of Gumby-style elasticity that allows them to do extreme back bends. I watch it in the same campy spirit in which I watch “Airplane!,” but its tone is resolutely serious. Indeed, the six knights are meant to symbolize the way that the Chinese used ancient tradition to trump Japan’s modern military.

Crude nationalism has long been a feature of Chinese productions, but the government seems to feel that things have gone too far. According to Chinese press reports, an official decree has called for more realism—in Second World War films, one Chinese soldier is to be shown dying for every Japanese who dies. That could prove to be a bonanza for the extras: one estimate suggested that, last year, seven hundred million Japanese died in Chinese films. In February, the Communist Party organ, People’s Daily, said that anti-Japanese dramas were becoming “reckless inventions.”

People who work at Hengdian know that their productions are provincial. During another visit to Zhang’s photography studio, he named a few recent films, and asked me if I was familiar with them. I wasn’t.

“See,” he said, turning to a couple of young actors sitting next to us. “No one watches our movies!”

“It’s ruined by the censors, that’s why. They’re boring.”

“There’s nothing from real life in the movies! Who wants to watch them?”

Abroad, Chinese cinema tends to be represented by a few élite directors, such as Chen Kaige (“Farewell, My Concubine”) and Jia Zhangke (“Still Life”). Their work is sometimes banned at home for being too political. I mentioned a Chinese director whom I admired, Ying Liang, whose 2006 film, “The Other Half,” offers a withering portrait of life in a modern industrial town—a place not unlike Hengdian itself. This time, it was Zhang who shook his head.

The most stunning sight in Hengdian is a vast construction zone, roughly the size of Central Park, where trucks and cranes and hundreds of laborers are building a full-scale replica of the Gardens of Perfect Brightness. Originally built in Beijing’s suburbs, the giant complex featured stone mansions and exquisitely manicured grounds. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops burned and looted it.

Re-creating the complex has long been Xu’s dream. Ten years ago, using nineteenth-century drawings as a guide he built a replica of one of the palace’s halls to prove that Hengdian could carry out the project. In 2008, the company announced the palace’s reconstruction. But Xu was blocked by the central government—company officials say they were told that the project was too sensitive and would use up valuable agricultural land. In Beijing, the palace ruins now serve as a “patriotic education base,” reminding visiting schoolchildren that China once suffered great humiliation at the hands of foreigners.

Last year, work was allowed to commence at the site, and when I drove by construction was proceeding furiously. It wasn’t historically accurate—concrete, rather than wood, was being used for the pillars—but the façades looked convincing enough. The enterprise had already swallowed up villages, fields, temples, and graveyards, but it remained a delicate matter, and hadn’t been mentioned in the Chinese media. The site contains no signs offering an explanation. It was as if the heart of fire-bombed Dresden were being secretly reconstructed in the Bavarian countryside.

It’s not entirely clear how Xu overcame the government’s concerns. (The company says that local officials believe the project will promote tourism.) He declined an interview, with company officials explaining that he was too busy at the construction site. In his autobiography, he writes that his wife found the Gardens of Perfect Brightness project so crazily excessive that she threatened suicide. The two later reconciled, however, and he forged ahead. “As a peasant, I hope to rebuild the Hengdian Gardens of Perfect Brightness to raise Chinese people’s spirit and China’s prestige,” he writes.

Xu’s son, Xu Yong’an, who now runs the company, told me that the replica will be given a different name: the Gardens of Ten Thousand Flowers. (This was the name of a labyrinth in the original garden.) Despite such minor alterations, Xu said, the goal was to faithfully re-create the past.

Indeed, Hengdian has started to build museums on the lot. Like the films, the exhibits energetically ratify the government’s viewpoint. A museum glorifying China’s military, just down the street from the construction site, includes a two-story hall with a diorama of the 2009 military parade, in Beijing, that commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Hundreds of three-inch soldiers goose-step in front of photographs of the parade route. The exhibits culminate in a full-sized mock-up of a Long March 2F rocket carrying a Shenzhou 5 space station.

Xu told me that the company also planned to create a museum devoted to China’s cinematic portrayal of its past. It will include artifacts, such as porcelain vases and cloisonné boxes from the ruins of the Gardens of Perfect Brightness. Once such projects are complete, Xu said, visitors will have a singularly comprehensive view of Chinese history. “Chinese historical museums are all scattered—you have a bit here and a bit there,” he told me. “At my museum, you’ll have the entire scope in one place. The film sets are fake, but, through a museum, I can offer real things.”

Over time, Hengdian’s sets could themselves become relics, as the company embraces computerized spectacle. Last year, ten million dollars’ worth of digital post-production equipment was installed on the Hengdian lot. A spin-off company, Hongdian Film Production, will assist filmmakers in adding computer-generated graphics and digital color correction. It is the first company in China to offer 3-D rendering services.

The general manager of the spin-off, Shi Xiongguang, showed me around the company’s offices, which had the sleek sterility of modern Hollywood: banks of computers, high-tech screening rooms, dubbing studios. We talked about the possibility that the spin-off would make Hengdian’s vast outdoor lots redundant. Shi emphasized, though, that technology was less important than storytelling. “From a technical point of view, you can re-create everything,” he said. “But the main thing is creating stories that people want to watch.”

Hengdian’s smallest attraction is Dazhi Zen Temple, a gleaming set that has been used to film such romances as “The Lovers and the Heartless Sword.” It’s also a functioning place of worship. Shi Wenqing, its abbot, told me that the original temple was built on Eight-Faced Mountain, in the sixth century. After the new one opened, in the nineteen-nineties, the original was closed to the public.

One day, I set off to explore the mountain. Ten miles northeast of Hengdian, it is surrounded by a wall that conceals a golf course and villas. I parked at the entrance, where a small sign said that locals could climb the mountain provided they were out by 5:30 A.M. It was past that, but I asked if I could enter.

“That’s only for locals,” the guard said, refusing to open the metal gates. We argued for a while, until I decided to test whether Hengdian was as much of a company town as Hollywood. I called a press spokesman at the studio for help. He called an assistant, who called the head of the golf course, who called the doorman’s boss, who told the doorman to let me in. Still, he refused. Finally, a Hengdian Group employee came over and argued with the guard, and with me, saying that my mission was misguided: the temple was gone, wrecked, destroyed. I said that I liked hiking. After an hour, they let me in.

An electric golf cart ferried me past a silver-haired man and two female caddies at Hole 16. We stopped at a sign, shaped like an arrow, that read, “Worshipping This Way Up.” I got out and followed a path of well-laid paving stones.

I walked up through forests of bamboo and pine, passing two broken stelae along the way: one commemorating a local hero who had fought the Japanese in the sixteenth century, the other a woman who had pioneered education in the mid-twentieth century.

The mountain is only seventeen hundred feet high, but it was steep and I hiked along the switchbacks for nearly forty-five minutes. Then it levelled off, and after a hundred yards there was a depression that looked like a sinkhole—the remnant of the volcano. Farther on, I found the golden water buffalo: two chunks of rock that vaguely suggested a buffalo’s head and a hump, with incense sticks planted in a crevice. Apparently, some locals made it up here once in a while. Next to it were three temples in the beautiful Jiangnan style of whitewashed walls and gray-tiled roofs. They were badly in need of repair, with loose tiles smashed on the ground.

The biggest structure at the temple was devoted to a folk god named Yu the Great, a mythical king who, like Noah, survived a great flood. The padlock was so rusty that I could pull it open and swing the creaky doors. Inside was a colorful statue of Yu, with a censer in front of him that was overflowing with ashes. He was flanked by stelae documenting the scores of people who had contributed to the temple’s reconstruction, in 1988. Cloth banners hung from the ceilings, listing pilgrimage societies whose members had made the trek up to honor Yu. The last one took place in 1994, around the time that Hengdian World Studios built its Zen temple and closed off the mountain.

As I headed back down the path, Hengdian reappeared through the smoggy haze. The movie lot had flooded the valley, its sets and sheds surging over the farms and villages. I could make out the glittering yellow roofs of the Forbidden City and the road that sliced through the mountains to the construction site for the Gardens of Perfect Brightness. Behind me was Hengdian’s past: crumbling, quiet, and unreal. ♦